structuring customer feedback
by Sabina Dietmayr, Dr. Carmen-Maria Albrecht, Johannes Breitwieser and alexander reiss
We can let off steam or praise a product or a service by using many different communication channels. There is no need for writing paper anymore. Digitalization allows us to give our feedback quickly and easily via social media or by means of company-internal satisfaction surveys. This not only allows customers to quickly and easily communicate what’s important to them – but companies also benefit from customer feedback. Because only those who know what customers think can sustainably improve the customer satisfaction.
How to make the most of customer comments
Big data, a lot of customer feedback – a lot of work
Collecting data like customer feedback benefits companies – but the often unmanageable amount on different platforms also poses a big challenge in terms of data analytics. In order to be able to use the mass of comments, they must first be formatted. After all, they are distributed across many different portals, usually in an unstructured free text format.
A first step to bring order to chaos is the so-called keyword methodology or text mining. Here the comments are categorized according to certain focus topics. Even more in-depth analyses can be carried out using syntactic word combinations or frequency, dependency and sentiment analysis.
Measuring satisfaction with NPS and OSAT
We recommend combining the results of text mining applications with a satisfaction score to categorize customer comments into negative and positive clusters according to the score used. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) or OSAT (Overall Satisfaction Index) are particularly suitable for this.
Now companies know exactly where the shoe pinches. The only thing missing is custom-made recommendations for action. To clearly derive them from the analysis results, there are three requirements:
- Detailed comments in the data sets
- Comments with a minimum of five words
- Touchpoint tracking: In which phase of the customer journey was the feedback given?
Don't forget: The early bird catches the worm! Collect feedback promptly in order to capture the customer experience at a touchpoint as unequivocally as possible.
The complete article is also published on LinkedIn.
